OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
ExClaim: Explainable Neural Claim Verification Using Rationalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

With the advent of deep learning, text generation language models have improved dramatically, with text at a similar level as human-written text. This can lead to rampant misinformation because content can now be created cheaply and distributed quickly. Automated claim verification methods exist to validate claims, but they lack foundational data and often use mainstream news as evidence sources that are strongly biased towards a specific agenda. Current claim verification methods use deep neural network models and complex algorithms for a high classification accuracy but it is at the expense of model explainability. The models are black-boxes and their decision-making process and the steps it took to arrive at a final prediction are obfuscated from the user. We introduce a novel claim verification approach, namely: ExClaim, that attempts to provide an explainable claim verification system with foundational evidence. Inspired by the legal system, ExClaim leverages rationalization to provide a verdict for the claim and justifies the verdict through a natural language explanation (rationale) to describe the model's decision-making process. ExClaim treats the verdict classification task as a question-answer problem and achieves a performance of 0.93 F1 score. It provides subtasks explanations to also justify the intermediate outcomes. Statistical and Explainable AI (XAI) evaluations are conducted to ensure valid and trustworthy outcomes. Ensuring claim verification systems are assured, rational, and explainable is an essential step toward improving Human-AI trust and the accessibility of black-box systems.
Leveraging Spatial and Temporal Correlations for Network Traffic Compression
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

The deployment of modern network applications is increasing the network size and traffic volumes at an unprecedented pace. Storing network-related information (e.g., traffic traces) is key to enable efficient network management. However, this task is becoming more challenging due to the ever-increasing data transmission rates and traffic volumes. In this paper, we present a novel method for network traffic compression that exploits spatial and temporal patterns naturally present in network traffic. We consider a realistic scenario where traffic measurements are performed at multiple links of a network topology using tools like SNMP or NetFlow. Such measurements can be seen as multiple time series that exhibit spatial and temporal correlations induced by the network topology, routing or user behavior. Our method leverages graph learning methods to effectively exploit both types of correlations for traffic compression. The experimental results show that our solution is able to outperform GZIP, the \textit{de facto} traffic compression method, improving by 50\%-65\% the compression ratio on three real-world networks.
The Pipeline for the Continuous Development of Artificial Intelligence Models -- Current State of Research and Practice
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Companies struggle to continuously develop and deploy AI models to complex production systems due to AI characteristics while assuring quality. To ease the development process, continuous pipelines for AI have become an active research area where consolidated and in-depth analysis regarding the terminology, triggers, tasks, and challenges is required. This paper includes a Multivocal Literature Review where we consolidated 151 relevant formal and informal sources. In addition, nine-semi structured interviews with participants from academia and industry verified and extended the obtained information. Based on these sources, this paper provides and compares terminologies for DevOps and CI/CD for AI, MLOps, (end-to-end) lifecycle management, and CD4ML. Furthermore, the paper provides an aggregated list of potential triggers for reiterating the pipeline, such as alert systems or schedules. In addition, this work uses a taxonomy creation strategy to present a consolidated pipeline comprising tasks regarding the continuous development of AI. This pipeline consists of four stages: Data Handling, Model Learning, Software Development and System Operations. Moreover, we map challenges regarding pipeline implementation, adaption, and usage for the continuous development of AI to these four stages.
Continuous-Time Ultra-Wideband-Inertial Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

We introduce a novel framework of continuous-time ultra-wideband-inertial sensor fusion for online motion estimation. Quaternion-based cubic cumulative B-splines are exploited for parameterizing motion states continuously over time. Systematic derivations of analytic kinematic interpolations and spatial differentiations are further provided. Based thereon, a new sliding-window spline fitting scheme is established for asynchronous multi-sensor fusion and online calibration. We conduct a dedicated validation of the quaternion spline fitting method, and evaluate the proposed system, SFUISE (spline fusion-based ultra-wideband-inertial state estimation), in real-world scenarios using public data set and experiments. The proposed sensor fusion system is real-time capable and delivers superior performance over state-of-the-art discrete-time schemes. We release the source code and own experimental data at https://github.com/KIT-ISAS/SFUISE.
Durability and Availability of Erasure-Coded Storage Systems with Concurrent Maintenance
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2023
Year: 2023

This initial version of this document was written back in 2014 for the sole purpose of providing fundamentals of reliability theory as well as to identify the theoretical types of machinery for the prediction of durability/availability of erasure-coded storage systems. Since the definition of a "system" is too broad, we specifically focus on warm/cold storage systems where the data is stored in a distributed fashion across different storage units with or without continuous operation. The contents of this document are dedicated to a review of fundamentals, a few major improved stochastic models, and several contributions of my work relevant to the field. One of the contributions of this document is the introduction of the most general form of Markov models for the estimation of mean time to failure. This work was partially later published in IEEE Transactions on Reliability. Very good approximations for the closed-form solutions for this general model are also investigated. Various storage configurations under different policies are compared using such advanced models. Later in a subsequent chapter, we have also considered multi-dimensional Markov models to address detached drive-medium combinations such as those found in optical disk and tape storage systems. It is not hard to anticipate such a system structure would most likely be part of future DNA storage libraries. This work is partially published in Elsevier Reliability and System Safety. Topics that include simulation modelings for more accurate estimations are included towards the end of the document by noting the deficiencies of the simplified canonical as well as more complex Markov models, due mainly to the stationary and static nature of Markovinity. Throughout the document, we shall focus on concurrently maintained systems although the discussions will only slightly change for the systems repaired one device at a time.
DASTSiam: Spatio-Temporal Fusion and Discriminative Augmentation for Improved Siamese Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Tracking tasks based on deep neural networks have greatly improved with the emergence of Siamese trackers. However, the appearance of targets often changes during tracking, which can reduce the robustness of the tracker when facing challenges such as aspect ratio change, occlusion, and scale variation. In addition, cluttered backgrounds can lead to multiple high response points in the response map, leading to incorrect target positioning. In this paper, we introduce two transformer-based modules to improve Siamese tracking called DASTSiam: the spatio-temporal (ST) fusion module and the Discriminative Augmentation (DA) module. The ST module uses cross-attention based accumulation of historical cues to improve robustness against object appearance changes, while the DA module associates semantic information between the template and search region to improve target discrimination. Moreover, Modifying the label assignment of anchors also improves the reliability of the object location. Our modules can be used with all Siamese trackers and show improved performance on several public datasets through comparative and ablation experiments.
Face Generation from Textual Features using Conditionally Trained Inputs to Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Generative Networks have proved to be extremely effective in image restoration and reconstruction in the past few years. Generating faces from textual descriptions is one such application where the power of generative algorithms can be used. The task of generating faces can be useful for a number of applications such as finding missing persons, identifying criminals, etc. This paper discusses a novel approach to generating human faces given a textual description regarding the facial features. We use the power of state of the art natural language processing models to convert face descriptions into learnable latent vectors which are then fed to a generative adversarial network which generates faces corresponding to those features. While this paper focuses on high level descriptions of faces only, the same approach can be tailored to generate any image based on fine grained textual features.
Design of Bistable Soft Deployable Structures via a Kirigami-inspired Planar Fabrication Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Fully soft bistable mechanisms have shown extensive applications ranging from soft robotics, wearable devices, and medical tools, to energy harvesting. However, the lack of design and fabrication methods that are easy and potentially scalable limits their further adoption into mainstream applications. Here a top-down planar approach is presented by introducing Kirigami-inspired engineering combined with a pre-stretching process. Using this method, Kirigami-Pre-stretched Substrate-Kirigami trilayered precursors are created in a planar manner; upon release, the strain mismatch -- due to the pre-stretching of substrate -- between layers would induce an out-of-plane buckling to achieve targeted three dimensional (3D) bistable structures. By combining experimental characterization, analytical modeling, and finite element simulation, the effect of the pattern size of Kirigami layers and pre-stretching on the geometry and stability of resulting 3D composites is explored. In addition, methods to realize soft bistable structures with arbitrary shapes and soft composites with multistable configurations are investigated, which could encourage further applications. Our method is demonstrated by using bistable soft Kirigami composites to construct two soft machines: (i) a bistable soft gripper that can gently grasp delicate objects with different shapes and sizes and (ii) a flytrap-inspired robot that can autonomously detect and capture objects.
A New Paradigm for Improved Image Steganography by using Adaptive Number of Dominant Discrete Cosine Transform Coefficients
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Image steganography camouflages secret messages in images by tampering image contents. There is a natural desire for hiding maximum secret information with the least possible distortions in the host image. This requires an algorithm that intelligently optimizes the capacity keeping the required imperceptibility of the image. This paper presents an image steganography scheme that preserves an adaptively chosen block of dominant coefficients from each Discrete Cosine Transform coefficients, whereas the rest of the coefficients are replaced with normalized secret image pixel values. Secret image pixel value are normalized in an adaptively chosen range. Embedding such kind of normalized data in adaptively chosen non-square L- shaped blocks utilize maximum embedding space available in each block that consequently results in maximizing payload capacity, while maintaining the image quality. This scheme achieved payload capacity up to 21.5 bit per pixel (bpp), while maintaining image quality of 38.24 dB peak signal to noise ratio.
Apples and Oranges? Assessing Image Quality over Content Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Image recognition and quality assessment are two important viewing tasks, while potentially following different visual mechanisms. This paper investigates if the two tasks can be performed in a multitask learning manner. A sequential spatial-channel attention module is proposed to simulate the visual attention and contrast sensitivity mechanisms that are crucial for content recognition and quality assessment. Spatial attention is shared between content recognition and quality assessment, while channel attention is solely for quality assessment. Such attention module is integrated into Transformer to build a uniform model for the two viewing tasks. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed uniform model can achieve promising performance for both quality assessment and content recognition tasks.
Efficient Encoders for Streaming Sequence Tagging
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

A naive application of state-of-the-art bidirectional encoders for streaming sequence tagging would require encoding each token from scratch for each new token in an incremental streaming input (like transcribed speech). The lack of re-usability of previous computation leads to a higher number of Floating Point Operations (or FLOPs) and higher number of unnecessary label flips. Increased FLOPs consequently lead to higher wall-clock time and increased label flipping leads to poorer streaming performance. In this work, we present a Hybrid Encoder with Adaptive Restart (HEAR) that addresses these issues while maintaining the performance of bidirectional encoders over the offline (or complete) inputs while improving performance on streaming (or incomplete) inputs. HEAR has a Hybrid unidirectional-bidirectional encoder architecture to perform sequence tagging, along with an Adaptive Restart Module (ARM) to selectively guide the restart of bidirectional portion of the encoder. Across four sequence tagging tasks, HEAR offers FLOP savings in streaming settings upto 71.1% and also outperforms bidirectional encoders for streaming predictions by upto +10% streaming exact match.
A New Approximation Algorithm for Minimum-Weight $(1,m)$--Connected Dominating Set
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

Consider a graph with nonnegative node weight. A vertex subset is called a CDS (connected dominating set) if every other node has at least one neighbor in the subset and the subset induces a connected subgraph. Furthermore, if every other node has at least $m$ neighbors in the subset, then the node subset is called a $(1,m)$CDS. The minimum-weight $(1,m)$CDS problem aims at finding a $(1,m)$CDS with minimum total node weight. In this paper, we present a new polynomial-time approximation algorithm for this problem with approximation ratio $2H(δ_{\max}+m-1)$, where $δ_{\max}$ is the maximum degree of the given graph and $H(\cdot)$ is the Harmonic function, i.e., $H(k)=\sum_{i=1}^k \frac{1}{i}$.
Efficient Training Under Limited Resources
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Training time budget and size of the dataset are among the factors affecting the performance of a Deep Neural Network (DNN). This paper shows that Neural Architecture Search (NAS), Hyper Parameters Optimization (HPO), and Data Augmentation help DNNs perform much better while these two factors are limited. However, searching for an optimal architecture and the best hyperparameter values besides a good combination of data augmentation techniques under low resources requires many experiments. We present our approach to achieving such a goal in three steps: reducing training epoch time by compressing the model while maintaining the performance compared to the original model, preventing model overfitting when the dataset is small, and performing the hyperparameter tuning. We used NOMAD, which is a blackbox optimization software based on a derivative-free algorithm to do NAS and HPO. Our work achieved an accuracy of 86.0 % on a tiny subset of Mini-ImageNet at the ICLR 2021 Hardware Aware Efficient Training (HAET) Challenge and won second place in the competition. The competition results can be found at haet2021.github.io/challenge and our source code can be found at github.com/DouniaLakhmiri/ICLR\_HAET2021.
Downlink Transmission under Heterogeneous Blocklength Constraints: Discrete Signaling with Single-User Decoding
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we consider the downlink broadcast channel under heterogenous blocklength constraints, where each user experiences different interference statistics across its received symbols. Different from the homogeneous blocklength case, the strong users with short blocklength transmitted symbol blocks usually cannot wait to receive the entire transmission frame and perform successive interference cancellation (SIC) owing to their stringent latency requirements. Even if SIC is feasible, it may not be perfect under finite blocklength constraints. To cope with the heterogeneity in latency and reliability requirements, we propose a practical downlink transmission scheme with discrete signaling and single-user decoding, i.e., without SIC. In addition, we derive the finite blocklength achievable rate and use it for guiding the design of channel coding and modulations. Both achievable rate and error probability simulation show that the proposed scheme can operate close to the benchmark scheme which assumes capacity-achieving signaling and perfect SIC.
A Survey on Actionable Knowledge
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Actionable Knowledge Discovery (AKD) is a crucial aspect of data mining that is gaining popularity and being applied in a wide range of domains. This is because AKD can extract valuable insights and information, also known as knowledge, from large datasets. The goal of this paper is to examine different research studies that focus on various domains and have different objectives. The paper will review and discuss the methods used in these studies in detail. AKD is a process of identifying and extracting actionable insights from data, which can be used to make informed decisions and improve business outcomes. It is a powerful tool for uncovering patterns and trends in data that can be used for various applications such as customer relationship management, marketing, and fraud detection. The research studies reviewed in this paper will explore different techniques and approaches for AKD in different domains, such as healthcare, finance, and telecommunications. The paper will provide a thorough analysis of the current state of AKD in the field and will review the main methods used by various research studies. Additionally, the paper will evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each method and will discuss any novel or new solutions presented in the field. Overall, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the methods and techniques used in AKD and the impact they have on different domains.
Employing similarity to highlight differences: On the impact of anatomical assumptions in chest X-ray registration methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

To facilitate both the detection and the interpretation of findings in chest X-rays, comparison with a previous image of the same patient is very valuable to radiologists. Today, the most common approach for deep learning methods to automatically inspect chest X-rays disregards the patient history and classifies only single images as normal or abnormal. Nevertheless, several methods for assisting in the task of comparison through image registration have been proposed in the past. However, as we illustrate, they tend to miss specific types of pathological changes like cardiomegaly and effusion. Due to assumptions on fixed anatomical structures or their measurements of registration quality, they produce unnaturally deformed warp fields impacting visualization of differences between moving and fixed images. We aim to overcome these limitations, through a new paradigm based on individual rib pair segmentation for anatomy penalized registration. Our method proves to be a natural way to limit the folding percentage of the warp field to 1/6 of the state of the art while increasing the overlap of ribs by more than 25%, implying difference images showing pathological changes overlooked by other methods. We develop an anatomically penalized convolutional multi-stage solution on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) data set, starting from less than 25 fully and 50 partly labeled training images, employing sequential instance memory segmentation with hole dropout, weak labeling, coarse-to-fine refinement and Gaussian mixture model histogram matching. We statistically evaluate the benefits of our method and highlight the limits of currently used metrics for registration of chest X-rays.
Velocity-Based LOD Reduction in Virtual Reality: A Psychometric Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2023
Year: 2023

Virtual Reality headsets enable users to explore the environment by performing self-induced movements. The retinal velocity produced by such motion reduces the visual system's ability to resolve fine detail. We measured the impact of self-induced head rotations on the ability to detect quality changes of a realistic 3D model in an immersive virtual reality environment. We varied the Level-of-Detail (LOD) as a function of rotational head velocity with different degrees of severity. Using a psychophysical method, we asked 17 participants to identify which of the two presented intervals contained the higher quality model under two different maximum velocity conditions. After fitting psychometric functions to data relating the percentage of correct responses to the aggressiveness of LOD manipulations, we identified the threshold severity for which participants could reliably (75\%) detect the lower LOD model. Participants accepted an approximately four-fold LOD reduction even in the low maximum velocity condition without a significant impact on perceived quality, which suggests that there is considerable potential for optimisation when users are moving (increased range of perceptual uncertainty). Moreover, LOD could be degraded significantly more in the maximum head velocity condition, suggesting these effects are indeed speed dependent.
Environment for the Design and Automation of New CDPR Architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a design and automation environment to study the control trajectory for new CDPR architectures, for instance CDPRs with an unusual number of cables or different motor location in the robot frame. In order to test the environment capabilities, an architecture of a planar under-constrained CDPR was designed, simulated, and implemented using standard industrial hardware. Both the simulated model and industrial prototype were running the same trajectories to determine the time delay and the error position between them. The tests have demonstrated that the simulated model of the CDPR reproduces the trajectories of the equivalent industrial prototype with a maximum deviation of 0.35% under loading and different speed conditions, despite the time delays produced by the data transmission and the non-deterministic communication protocols used to connect the industrial automation controller with the simulated model. The results have shown that the environment is suitable for trajectory control and workspace analysis of new CDPR architectures under different dynamic conditions.